IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyWilliam’s textIntroduction from Poor Monkey: The Child in Literature by Peter CoveneyPublished in 1957 by RockliffWilliam’s source text, the only one taken from a book, was an essay by Peter Coveney (1957).This was the longest chosen by any writer and William cut around 60% of the original, making 65edits in developing his 909 word IELTS text. The third and eighth paragraphs of the original text arealmost entirely discarded, as are lengthy stretches (50 words or more) of every paragraph except thefirst and fourth.Much in the rejected passages concerns the original author’s informing theory of the relationshipbetween literature and social change. In the third paragraph, he anticipates criticism and defends hisapproach; ‘To suggest a relation between literature and society might seem to imply that too much,perhaps, is to be explained too easily by too little’. This is eliminated from the IELTS text, whilein other cases William offers summaries of parts of the original of varying length. The first twosentences of the original text – ‘Until the last decades of the eighteenth century, the child did notexist as an important and continuous theme in English literature. Childhood as a major theme camewith the generation of Blake and Wordsworth.’ – is replaced by a single sentence in the edited text– ‘Childhood as an important theme of English literature did not exist before the last decades of theeighteenth century and the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth.’, saving nine words. The sentence ‘Artwas on the run; the ivory tower had become the substitute for the wished-for public arena’ substitutesfor 169 words on this theme in the original.References to specific works of literature (The Chimney Sweeper, Ode on Intimations of Immortality,The Prelude, Hard Times, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, Essay on InfantileSexuality, Way of All Flesh, Peter Pan) and to a number of writers (Addison, Butler, Carroll, Dryden,James, Johnson, Pope, Prior, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Shaw, Twain) are removed, together withreferences to other critics (Empson), although the names of Blake, Dickens, Darwin, Freud, Marx andWordsworth are retained. Some technical literary vocabulary such as ‘Augustan’, ‘ode’, ‘Romantics’and ‘Shakespearian’ is cut (although ‘lyrics’, ‘poetry’ and ‘sensibility’ are retained), as are relativelyinfrequent words such as ‘cosmology’, ‘esoteric’, ‘moribund’, ‘congenial’ and ‘introversion’. Asa result, in common with most other writers, the proportion of frequent words is higher and theproportion of very infrequent words lower in the edited text than in the source (Figure 1 and Figure 2).As was the case for Anne and Jane, one effect of William’s changes is to narrow the scope of the essay.The edited version is focussed more closely on the theme of the treatment of childhood at the expenseof discussion of specific works and of arguments supporting the thesis of literature as an expressionof social change and crisis. As a result, the adapted text takes on more of the characteristics of anhistorical narrative with a cause/effect structure and loses elements of persuasion and argumentation.The changes to the text had little effect on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level estimate (Figure 3), butmade it easier to read according to the Coh-Metrix readability formula.306 www.ielts.org